Whilst the current state of personal debt and payment defaulting is well publicised (the average household debt in the UK – excluding mortgages – was £7,975 in January 20121), organisations, too, are looking to improve their cash flow and leaving longer periods between invoicing and payment. This issue has prompted banks and other financial organisations to ramp up collections and dedicate bigger contact centre teams to recovering money.

Through the partnership, Datapoint Professional Services delivers Aspect’s Optimised Collections to enable organisations to proactively engage with their customers across voice, email, web and instant messaging in order to achieve successful collections. Optimised Collections tightly integrates information from resource schedules, right party connect rates, and best-time-to-call strategies. This enables collections managers to forecast staffing to achieve collections targets, and manage collector ‘effectiveness’ rather than ‘activity’.

Jim Close, UK Managing Director at Datapoint said:

“Banks and collections need to balance their books and reduce risk as well as identify high-risk debtors. The contact centre, along with an effective collections strategy, is critical to recovery or promises to pay (PTPs). Datapoint’s partnership with Aspect means that together we can enable collections contact centres to devise an appropriate, multi-channel contact strategy that will recoup money owed quickly, whilst delivering a high standard of customer experience.”

Peter Nicol, VP Northern Europe at Aspect, adds

“The modern consumer is super-connected and has a multitude of communications channels available to them, so organisations need to take advantage of this and address them in new ways. If they execute the right strategy supported by the appropriate technology, they can still improve the connect rate while reducing resources – this reduces the amount of bad debt and saves on costs too.”

Aspect Optimised Collections includes components of Aspect’s Workforce Optimisation suite to align collections activities at the right time with contact centre agents who have the right skills. It enables contact centre managers to execute blended interaction strategies so that call plans can dynamically adapt to staffing and fluctuations in call volumes and demand. Datapoint Professional Services is also able to deploy Microsoft® Lync® to seamlessly connect collections agents, debtors, and enterprise knowledge workers through multiple communications channels in order to deliver a superior customer service.

With extensive industry knowledge and project management experience, Datapoint Professional Services comprises experienced, full life cycle communications and contact centre expert practitioners to lead an organisation to achieve specific collections goals.